Anne Clifford Biography

Anne Clifford (1590–1676) fought to amend English inheritance
laws that prevented her from assuming the aristocratic titles to vast
lands in Cumbria, in the north of England, that had been in her family
for several centuries. Her legal battle was unsuccessful, but she
eventually came into her inheritance merely
by outliving all the males in the family. Her voluminous journals
detailed this struggle as well as other aspects of her fascinating
life, and the surviving diaries provide a rich glimpse of life in
Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Clifford was born on January 29, 1590, though some sources cite 1591 as
the year of her birth. She came from a prominent family that possessed
hundreds of acres of land in the north of England, anchored by immense
castles, that had been passed down for more than three centuries by the
time she was born. These properties included Skipton Castle in North
Yorkshire, which had been built around 1100 by Robert de Romillé, a
figure of historical importance as part of the French Norman contingent
that invaded England in 1066 under the leadership of William the Conqueror
(c. 1027–1087). The Cliffords were given that castle and ownership
of its adjacent lands in 1310 by decree of King Edward II
(1284–1327). By that point they already held Brough Castle in
Cumbria, which in its original construction dated back to the 1090s and is
thought to be one of the first stone castles in England. There was also
another castle in Cumbria, this one called Brougham, which had been built
on the site of an old Roman fortification.

Descended from Eminent Forebears

Clifford was born at Skipton Castle to Margaret Russell, daughter of
Francis Russell, the 2nd Earl of Bedford. Clifford's maternal
grandfather held important diplomatic posts under Elizabeth I
(1533–1603) as well as serving as Privy Councillor, one of the
monarch's closest advisors. Young Anne was the third child born to
Margaret, also known as the Countess of Cumberland, but the first daughter
and the first to survive her childhood. The lack of male heirs troubled
her father, George Clifford, who was the 3rd Earl of Cumberland and 14th
Baron de Clifford of Westmorland. He had inherited Skipton and Brough
castles as well as four properties from his father, and this line of
Clifford's heritage included some illustrious and even infamous
figures in English history. They included John "The Butcher"
Clifford, who allegedly beheaded the Duke of York in one notorious battle
in 1460 that was a turning point in the War of the Roses, a civil conflict
of the mid-fifteenth century that pitted the houses of Lancaster and York
against one another in a battle for the throne.

Like his father-in-law, George Clifford was also a well-known figure in
the court of Elizabeth. He was the most famous jouster among the
queen's highly competitive courtiers, and was made a naval
commander during the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604). In the first
years of that conflict, he nearly captured the island of Puerto Rico for
England when he seized the citadel La Fortaleza, but he was forced to flee
when his forces were outnumbered. Like most sea captains of the era,
George Clifford trod a shifting line between legitimate seizure of enemy
ships and outright piracy, and probably earned small fortune from looting
Spanish cargo. He was known to have lost money on horse racing and
jousting contests, however, and was forced to sell some of his lands.

Because her father was away at sea or at court for much of her childhood,
Clifford was raised in a household dominated by women. She was given a
tutor, which was somewhat unusual for a young woman of her time, and hers
was the poet Samuel Daniel, (1562–1619), who held the post of poet
laureate of England for a time. Daniel was part of Queen
Elizabeth's retinue, and in her teen years Clifford spent time at
court, like other well-born young men and women whose families were
connected to the regime. Daniel penned masques that Clifford and a future
queen of England, Anne of Denmark, took part in; these were lavish stage
spectacles performed for the queen. The other Anne married James I, who
ascended to the English throne following the death of Elizabeth in 1603.

Eyewitness to History

That was a momentous year in English history, and Clifford spent it at
court. She chronicled it the earliest of her extant diaries, which is one
of the first examples of an English woman's autobiographical
writing. In it she wrote of the death of Elizabeth, noting that the
"corpse came by night in a barge from Richmond to Whitehall, my
Mother and a great company of ladies attending it, where it continued a
great while standing in the Drawing Chamber, where it was watched all
night by several lords and ladies, my Mother sitting up with it two or
three nights, but my lady would not give me leave to watch, by reason that
I was held too young."

After James's ascendancy, however, Clifford and her mother found
themselves somewhat out of favor, and spent far less time at court. In
1605 George Clifford died, with Anne his sole offspring. His will
specified that all titles and properties of his were to pass to his
brother, Francis Clifford, and from then on to all other living male
heirs. If there were no more Clifford men, only then would his daughter
inherit the land and peerages. She was left a sum of 15,000 pounds
instead. But Clifford and her mother knew that the original deed from
Edward II stated that the baronies would pass to an "heir of the
body"—a biological child, that is—with no mention of
its gender. Believing that George Clifford's will broke that
clause, Anne entered into a long legal battle to take possession of what
she believed was rightfully due her as a Clifford.

Clifford's mother encouraged her lawsuit, but those opposed to it
were well known and influential figures. They included King James and the
Archbishop of Canterbury, who urged her to accept the cash settlement her
uncle offered her and to let the matter rest, as well as Richard
Sackville, whom she married in 1609, the year she turned 19. Sackville was
the third Earl of Dorset, and had inherited his own famous property, Knole
House, an immense home in northwest Kent completed in the 1480s. The
couple had five children, but only two survived to adulthood: Margaret,
born in 1614, and Isabella, born in 1622.

Urged to Abandon Cause

Clifford detailed the most difficult years of her lawsuit, from 1616 to
1619, in a journal that became known as her
Knole Diary
. In it she wrote of the late Queen Elizabeth, and had undoubtedly been
influenced by the strongwilled monarch during her years at court as an
impressionable teenager. Elizabeth had also battled to claim her rightful
inheritance—in this case, the throne—against immense and
united opposition. Clifford wondered why, if it was possible for an
English woman to inherit sovereignty over a nation, was she barred from
inheriting the Clifford baronies? In one passage she asserted that
"if Queen Elizabeth had lived she intended to prefer me to be of
the Privy Chamber, for at that time there was much hope and expectation of
me as of any other yong Ladie whatsoever," according to a scholarly
article Mihoko Suzuki published in the journal
Clio
.

Richard Sackville died in 1624, and six years later his widow wed Philip
Herbert, the 4th Earl of Pembroke and a favorite of King James. Her second
husband also served as Lord Chamberlain under King Charles I
(1600–1649), as governor of the Isle of Wight, and chancellor of
Oxford University; each of these positions meant the two lived apart for
much of their marriage. Finally, in 1643 the last of the male Cliffords
died, and Clifford inherited at the age of 53 what she had hoped to
receive as a teenager. The titles formally passed to her in 1646, but
England was enmeshed in a bloody civil war, and she was forced to remain
in London for the next few years.

Clifford headed north in the early 1650s when hostilities ceased. She
began a series of costly renovations on her castles and the buildings on
her land, beginning with the church at Skipton. The small fortune she
spent to renovate Skipton Castle helped make it one of best-preserved
castles in Britain more than three hundred years later. The other
important home, Brough Castle, had not been inhabited since a fire in
1521, and had fallen into a state of disrepair in the intervening 130
years. Clifford fixed much of it and lived there herself for a time, but
it was permanently uninhabited after her death and fell again into ruin.
Nearby she had a memorial to her mother erected which remained one of the
local landmarks three centuries later. Called the Countess Pillar, the
14-foot-high stone column sits at the intersection of the drive from
Brough Castle to the main roads, and was the junction where Clifford said
good-bye to her mother for the last time before the Countess's
death in 1616. Like her mother, Clifford carried on the tradition of
charitable giving, or alms, to the poorest of those who lived on the
family lands. She established aid centers at Beamsley, near Skipton, and
at Dolestone, near Brough, to provide help for impoverished widows in the
area. She also established St. Anne's Hospital, a retirement home
for the female servants on her estates.

Left Important Historical Record

Even later in her life, Clifford displayed a rebellious streak; she
sported a close-cropped head at times, and was known to smoke a pipe.
Several images of her, at various stages of her life, are featured in an
immense family portrait she commissioned, the
Great Picture of the Clifford Family
, probably painted by Jan van Belcamp around 1647. With it, she sought to
affirm her rightful place in the history of her family, as she had done in
The Great Books of the Clifford Family
, a multi-volume chronicle of the line that includes legal documents she
and her mother assembled, papers from her own inheritance lawsuit, and
biographies of her ancestors that she wrote herself. The last diary entry
of her life was written on March 21, 1676, the day before she died at the
age of 86 at Brougham Castle, in the same room in which her father had
been born.

Clifford's colorful life and determined personality have fascinated
subsequent generations. The poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West
(1892–1962) was a descendant of Edward Sackville, the brother of
Clifford's first husband, and wrote of her own life at Knole House
as a young woman; she also served as editor of a 1923 reprint of
The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford
. The iconoclastic Sackville-West, who was married but bisexual, was also
close to the writer Virginia Woolf, who reportedly based some aspects of
her 1928 transgender-themed novel
Orlando
on Sackville-West. Scholar Nicky Hallett posited that Woolf modeled the
Elizabethan-era character on Clifford herself. The novel was made into a
1992 film that starred Tilda Swinton in the title role.